


Scully's Cancer Arc and "Never Again"

by PlaidAdder



Series: X-Files Meta [10]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Cancer, Gen, Meta, Never again, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-30
Updated: 2014-06-30
Packaged: 2018-02-06 19:12:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1869195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which I talk about how having been through cancer gives me a brand new POV on Scully's cancer arc, with special reference to "Never Again."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scully's Cancer Arc and "Never Again"

Probably my favorite thing about the digital revolution at this point is the fact that it makes rewatching possible. In my youth, or even in my young adulthood—during which time  _The X-Files_ was originally broadcast—you couldn’t rewatch a show in the order in which it was shown, unless you had personally videotaped every single episode of its run, or knew someone who had. But now, it is relatively easy to go back and re-experience a show that made an impression on you 10, 20, 30 years earlier, and see it from the point of view of the person you went on to become. It’s like time traveling inside your own head.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in my response to the season 4 episode “Never Again,” broadcast somewhere aroun 1996-1997. It forms part of a 3-episode arc in which Scully deals with the discovery that she has cancer, almost certainly as a result of her abduction in Season 2. At the end of “Leonard Betts,” Scully has good reason to believe she has cancer; but since this information comes to her from a cancer-eating vampire, we can’t say it’s a formal diagnosis. During “Never Again,” she is dealing with this possibility—or not dealing with it, as the case may be—alone. Then, in “Memento Mori,” she gets the diagnosis (a nasopharyngeal mass almost certain to turn into brain cancer) and her prognosis (death, probably soon) and tells Mulder; both of them, along different paths, search for the truth about what happened to her during her abduction. This arc will extend into at least Season 5, but after Memento Mori it’s pretty much dropped except for the occasional nosebleed and resultant Significant Looks.

So one difference between the me who originally watched season 4, and the me who just rewatched it, is that I’m now a cancer survivor who has passed the five year mark. And you may perhaps be wondering, if you’ve made it this far, in what ways does Scully’s cancer arc look different once you have actually experienced cancer yourself?

Oddly enough, I found that the episode that resonated most clearly with my emotional experience was not the All About Scully’s Cancer episode “Memento Mori”—more on that in a moment—but “Never Again,” an episode in which Scully’s cancer is never explicitly mentioned—and an episode which I didn’t particularly care for when I first saw it.

There’s a lot to dislike about “Never Again.” Scully acts very out of character in some ways that tend to drive anti-patriarchy persons such as myself crazy. Having spent the beginning of the episode being pissy to Mulder for no reason he can understand, she goes to Philadelphia on her own anyway (Mulder’s on vacation) to investigate what she knows is a bullshit story about aliens being peddled by a Russian con man to the ever-gullible Mulder. After another contentious conversation with the absent Mulder, she then runs into a kind of creepy guy in a tattoo parlor who we know has just killed a woman because he thought his tattoo was telling him to do it—and goes out drinking with him, gets a tattoo because he dares her to, and has sex with him. Mulder eventually discovers this, because the guy eventually tries to kill her too. The episode ends with them sitting on opposite sides of their office, making an awkward and very tense attempt to talk about it, which eventually collapses into pained silence.

Looked at alone, it just looks as if in “Never Again” sexism has temporarily taken over Scully’s characterization. That happens sometimes. Like the jealous-ex stereotype introduced to us in “War of the Coprophages” and “Syzygyzy,” Scully is pissed off that Mulder doesn’t value her enough or give her enough attention; she tries to go her own way but winds up doing his bidding anyhow because she can’t break his spell; she acts out by having sex with another man, perhaps subconsciously hoping it will make him jealous; it backfires, she winds up humiliated. Which is why, despite the fact that Jodie Foster’s voicing the tattoo sort of almost turned this into a triangulated lesbian encounter, I never liked “Never Again.”

All of that becomes completely different—to the current me, anyhow—when you realize that this episode is just as much about Scully’s cancer as “Memento Mori” is. (On edit: It was pointed out in the comments that "Never Again" was not originally intended to be part of the cancer arc. I explain in the comments why I still think this is a valid reading even though it was produced by an arbitrary change in the air date.) Her apparently unmotivated frustration with Mulder at the beginning of the episode is an effect of something that I, at any rate, went through after diagnosis: she looks around at her life, imagines what it would be like if she were to die tomorrow, and realizes that she doesn’t yet have a lot of things she wants—and that she spends a lot of her time on shit that (now that mortality looms) appears to be a complete waste of her short and precious life. She is particularly alarmed by the extent to which her own life has been overwritten by Mulder’s passions and Mulder’s priorities. This is exacerbated by the fact that in their first scene, she’s at the Vietnam Memorial listening to the Russian con man tell him a story which she recognizes as having been cooked up based on the plot of an episode of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Wondering, no doubt, how much of her life she has already lost listening to similarly incredible stories and following Mulder down one rabbit hole after another, she drifts over to a bouquet of flowers left by a mourner; she picks a petal off one of the dying roses and takes it back with her to their office. He of course doesn’t understand its significance to her. He doesn’t really understand anything she does in this episode. He can’t. He doesn’t know that she’s looking into the abyss, and second-guessing every decision she’s ever made about how to use the life that was given to her. And obviously one of those decisions was becoming Mulder’s partner—as opposed to the spy/debunker she was intended to be.

Once she gets to Philadelphia she acts out another impulse very familiar to me: frustrated with the fact that her current life and self don’t appear to be worthy of the precious and fleeting time she has left, she starts searching for some other life and some other self that might make the time she has left more meaningful. This is why so much of what she does in Philadelphia is out of character—she is deliberately trying  _not_  to be herself, or at least not to be the woman we’ve watched her become during her partnership with Mulder. When the killer tries to take her out to a fancy restaurant that he assumes will be part of her world, she asks to spend the night in his world instead (the dive bar near the tattoo parlor). She has sex with a total stranger because she’s started to wonder what she’s missed by being rational and responsible all her life, and she doesn’t have much time left to find out. 

Scully’s last-minute search for meaning doesn’t go well. That’s partly because of the generic demands of the show—really, any time either of them has sex with anyone it’s going to involve peril and monsters—and, sure, partly because the show will never let her become truly independent of Mulder. But it’s also partly because, as we all eventually discover, there isn’t some Great Intense Thing out there that you’ve missed out on and have to discover at all costs before you die. The meaningful life is the one that you’ve built for yourself with the people you love—even if sometimes those people may take you for granted or just plain drive you crazy.

That’s one of the reasons I now love that painful final scene, with the two of them sitting there in silence, unable for the moment to understand each other. When he asks her to tell him what’s wrong—disguising his hurt and bafflement, characteristically, as flippancy—she won’t tell him. “All this because I didn’t get you a desk?” he asks; and she says, “Not everything is about you, Mulder. This is my life.” He says, “But it’s m—” and then never finishes the word. It was obviously going to be “It’s my life too;” but he stops. ‘This’ is what happened in Philadelphia; ‘this’ is also what’s happening now, and what’s happened between them in that office and in the field for the past four years. She acknowledges the fact that he and the X-Files have become her life; but she also warns him that they’re only part of it, and that her life is broader and deeper and, at the moment, darker than he can ever really understand. Because although she must foresee the day when she’s going to tell him what’s going on, she also knows that no matter how much he sympathizes, no matter how much he cares, he can never experience what she’s going through. Her body is her own. Only she lives there; only she will die there.

So there they are, together and apart; and that’s what it’s like, after you know.

"Memento Mori," on the other hand, is less affecting to me because it’s so much more obviously infested with cancer mythology. No disease spawns more metaphors and allegories and myths and nightmares than cancer does; and "Memento Mori" hits most of the cliches. If you could subtract the uniformly horrible voice-overs which purport to be entries in Scully’s journal, however, there would still be a few things in there that actually speak to the experience of going through this. One is simply the horror of having to make your body so vulnerable to medical intervention—a horror represented symbolically through the alien abduction and its unspecified "tests," and then more literally in the fact that Scully puts herself in the hands of a doctor who turns out to be trying to kill her. (This itself is ironic in that chemo and radiation are in fact very bad for you and used on you precisely because they will kill a lot of your cells.) Because the thing is, you don’t know. You hope your oncologist knows what he’s doing. But you yourself don’t have any way of verifying that. It’s terrifying to have to give up that much control over your own body and your life to someone you really haven’t known very long. Scully at least can interpret her own lab results. I couldn’t even do that.

The other thing that actually rings true is the way Mulder reacts to Scully’s diagnosis. I got this response a lot—not, fortunately, from my near and dear, who were much more able to understand the place I was in and be there with me, but from friends and colleagues who I had to tell. Mulder’s reaction probably seems to him, and probably seemed to the pre-cancer me, to be supportive and positive: he refuses to believe that the cancer is inevitably fatal, insists that there must be a way to fight it, and determines to go forth and find that way. But this is a response that comes less out of love than out of fear. Everyone wants to talk about how you are sure to get better and everything will be fine and it’s amazing what medicine can do these days. They keep it positive because the negatives are too terrifying to contemplate. Which means that you are left alone with the negative feelings that you’ve possibly been told, by one or more well-meaning people who have read self-help books about the power of positive thinking, that you’re not supposed to have because they inhibit the healing process.

And that’s what happens to Scully when she first tells him. At the end of the episode, though, Mulder’s experience of trying to get to the bottom of Scully’s abduction story has introduced him to some of the horrors involved in it; and when she breaks down over the death of the last of her fellow abductees, he’s able to be there not only for her but  _with_  her. Of course the episode then immediately rescues the viewers by having Scully proclaim her determination to go back and continue the work, where she will remain improbably asymptomatic for quite some time. 

Scully’s eventually cured, or at least sent into remission. I’ve passed the five year mark and I don’t worry about its coming back. In a way, all this rewatching confirms that the years that passed since my diagnosis haven’t just been loss—that although I will never get over what I lost that year, I have actually gained something from this experience, even if it’s just a richer understanding of an old TV show. But I think the reason I like “Never Again” more than “Memento Mori” is that it is truer to the darker, more complicated, harder-to-explain emotions that come wiht this experience—precisely because it doesn’t have to present itself as an episode About Cancer.


End file.
